When I visit family and friends who don’t live in the Los Angeles area, I’m always asked, “Isn’t the weather great?”  My joke is that the pretty consistent weather actually leads to little recognition of time.  There is no season to attach memories to, so something that happened three winters ago, you might think was actually last spring!  This is my absolute only complaint about pretty much perfect weather.  My favorite thing is feeling the sunshine on my face and body almost every day!  Even when it’s cold or hot, it doesn’t take much mental fortitude to weather the conditions.

When you think of sunshine, Southern California, and the outdoors, the beach is usually top of mind but there are SO MANY HIKES!  Most local hikes within the city limits top about four miles and around five hundred feet in elevation gains, but there are a ton within a one to two-hour drive that gets you in double digits for mileage and in the thousands for elevation.  I had never done any of the latter until one of my friends started making it a point to do a long hike once a month.  Inspired, I said, “Hey, I want to do that.” Which hike did we go on then? Inspiration Point in Altadena, how kismet.  It’s about 10 miles and almost 3,000 feet up!

Even with the good weather, it’s too easy to get stuck indoors.  Even with seasons, it’s easy for one year to still blend into the next.  Even on the hike, the experience could have stopped on the trail.  But because of what others had taken the time to do before me, the hike was punctuated with learning and experiences outside of putting one foot in front of the other.  Children learn so much because so much is novel and new.  It’s important for us to build novel and new situations for ourselves.  You don’t have to go hike to make this happen.  This is one of the principles of Revolution In Motion, too. We really get to dance in a relationship between being human and nature within our own bodies every day.  The design, resiliency, and balance in this naturally occurring ‘thing’ and our ability to consciously appreciate its intricacies should not be taken for granted.  New perspectives offer the opportunity for new observations, new information, and a deeper connectedness, not only to our body but to our species and environment as a whole.  Small practices of movement like Revolution In Motion allow our minds to be open to the new and to change, priming us for growth and actionable points of inspiration!